SpaceCurve, a Seattle startup that’s developing new ways to analyze location-based services, social media chatter and other information, has raised $2.7 million and named John Slitz as CEO. Investors in the round, a portion of which was previously reported by GeekWire, include Reed Elsevier Ventures, Divergent Ventures, Musea Ventures and others.

Slitz is the former CEO of Systems Research and Development, which was acquired by IBM. At IBM, he served as general manager of the threat, fraud and intelligence business unit. Before IBM, he served as senior vice president of marketing at Novell.

The 9-person company is developing technologies that analyze massive data feeds, putting that data in context of one’s location. Examples of how the technology could be used include analysis of weather systems, the Tweet stream or moving vehicles, the latter of which is a problem also being tackled by Kirkland-based Inrix.

John Slitz

“The bottleneck is that you just can’t index (the data) as fast as you are getting it,” SpaceCurve founder J. Andrew Rogers told GeekWire last year. “The other (problem) is the scale of the data. There are many data sources that are really cool that generate terabytes or, in some high-end cases petabytes per day, and the ability to build distributed, spacial data models is traditionally something that you can’t do. That was the original use case of this technology.”

SpaceCurve moved to Seattle from Silicon Valley in 2010, in part to draw from the region’s strong core of technical talent. The company just moved to new offices in Pioneer Square, in part to accommodate its growth plans.

“In Silicon Valley, acquiring a team of those engineers is impossible for a company like ours,” said Rogers. “There are too many sexy, big companies that suck all of the oxygen out of the room.”

Previously on GeekWireSpaceCurve lands in Seattle, raises cash to analyze data feeds

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